I write about the television business. Why networks cancel your favorite shows, why sure things don’t go to series, why the Nielsen ratings still matter, if it concerns the small screen, it concerns me too. I've studied media since college and have been covering television since 2009 for sites such as FilmSchoolRejects.com and ScreenInvasion.com. In that time I've learned it’s one of the most fascinating entertainment mediums to explore. It’s a medium that runs a million miles a minute where one week’s smash hit can be another week’s failure. It takes a trained eye to understand its complexity, and that’s what I intend to do.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

On Sunday night, hundreds of thousands of users attempted to tune in at 9pm EST to watch the season finale of smash hit True Detective on HBO’s new-media service, HBO Go. Almost immediately, the majority of them logged on to twitter to complain they had no other way to watch the season finale when they learned the service had crashed. What started to become apparent as the tweets came in, was many of the users in question were using the accounts of friends and family - something HBO has said in the past they’re not concerned with. These extra, non-paying customers overloaded the service and crashed it, and it’s in this news where the lie of cord-cutting being a viable alternative for television viewers begins to unravel.

At the start of 2014, I relocated from New York to Los Angeles. Before the move, I was convinced I would drop my cable subscription as I almost never watched television live on a regular basis, and the few times I did were on free, over-the-air networks. I was convinced after relocating I would exclusively subscribe to the myth that all I needed was NetflixNetflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. But what became immediately apparent is that shift was going to be more of a hassle than it was worth, and furthermore, was going to take away an aspect of the viewing process I refused to live without.

I’m a millennial. I am the demographic targeted by cord-cutting services as many believe I’ve grown tired of the cable bill. That I’ve grown tired of paying for programs and networks I don’t watch. But by paying for even just a basic cable package with no premium stations like HBO, the benefits are immediately apparent, and until these differences are resolved, cord-cutting will never be the consumer savior services like Hulu want you to believe.

The biggest issue with cord-cutting is the simple fact that no two internet connects are made equal. During my transition, I was with various friends while my apartment was being searched for and eventually set up. In that time, I was on internet connections of varying quality. Some were just as powerful as the one I had back in New York, others were so sluggish that running so much as a second device was too strenuous for the system. Because of this, watching series through online services was difficult. Many services require at least a moderately fast connection to get a picture that’s actually viewable, but there would be many instances where watching something even as non-visually dynamic as The Daily Show the morning after an airing was too much for the stream, and it would enter a never ending state of pixilated buffering.

That brings us to another problem: next day viewing. One of the sacrifices of cord-cutting is the viewer cannot watch live, but this makes one just as subservient to the demands of a corporate entity as cable subscribers, sometimes worse. The idea of cord-cutting, among other things, is the idea that you’re in control of your viewing experience… but you’re not. You can’t begin watching most episodes until hours after they’ve aired on the west coast, and often, episodes stop being available after a certain period of time until the season ends. The only way to secure your viewership is to pay a fee on top of what you pay for services like Hulu to get a season pass from places like Amazon and iTunes. Those season passes lead to the next problem, an inability to experiment.

With standard cable service, viewers are able to discover and experiment with new programs they might be interested in at no extra cost. I learned this first hand during the move by discovering a guilty pleasure in watching Rob Dyrdek’s Ridiculousness in-between apartment application submissions. Even if you don’t do it live, access to a cable service’s on-demand channel makes experimentation easy… this isn’t the case if one is a cord-cutter. By the time you come around to the buzz of a show, it’s possible you can’t watch it for free anymore because the allotted time for free playback has expired. Suddenly, you’re forced to shell out an additional $2-$3 per episode just to see if you’re going to like the pilot of a new series, not even the series as a whole.

What the cord-cutting philosophy wants you to believe is it’s the be-all, end-all alternative to standard cable and satellite subscriptions. But while the cost may be slightly higher overall for that standard service, customers are paying for something a little extra: reliability. Is that to say traditional services don’t suffer outages? Of course not. Even service giants go down at extremely inconvenient times – such as happened during the Super Bowl with Time WarnerTime Warner (though customers were reimbursed for that particular outage) – but those outages are few and far between when compared to that of services like Netflix who went down for extended periods of time last December and the December before that. Of course this discussion brings us right back to where we started: the highly publicized crumbling of HBO Go on Sunday night.

Is cord-cutting a viable option for some? Yes, if one isn’t much of a television viewer in general. The method is a very real way to go in an attempt to save a few bucks every month. But for the type of viewer being targeted by these services, cord-cutting is nowhere near where it needs to be to topple the corporate giant of big business cable and satellite television. If Netflix is going to go down two December holidays in a row and HBO Go shut down from user overload, how can we expect the idea of cord-cutting to be truly viable?

If I can’t experiment with new shows, watch live with the rest of the world and pay a flat rate for the programs I do want to watch, what’s the point of cord-cutting for someone like me, a millennial that watches more television than they know what to do with? Recent studies show the current generation is, in reality, watching more television than ever before, it just doesn’t watch the majority of it live. But that doesn’t matter to the argument of cord-cutting. If you want reliable service that offers you exactly what you want, even if it’s time-shifted, a basic cable package with the added benefit of DVR is still the best option. Could this change one day? Absolutely, there’s no argument in the idea that consumers shouldn’t have a second option outside of standard service. But that day is not today.

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The biggest issue with cord-cutting is that all of these services rely on the backbone of the providers they hope to usurp. As long as the cable companies control the internet pipelines there will not be a big push for significantly improved bandwidth capabilities because at this point it only enables their competitors.

I “cut the cord” over 3 years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I have a PS3 which is a much better option for video streaming than Roku. I’ve heard the xbox is just as good. My OTA signals give me a much better HD picture than Comcast ever did (1080P!). I paid 26 dollars for my HD antennae. I pay $8 a month for Netflix. I pay $75 a month for 30mbps internet. I was paying $155 a month for cable and internet before. So over 3 years that’s roughly a $2700 savings. I use my new found savings to see lots of movies in the theater and to buy Blu-Rays to watch at home. I DO NOT miss cable.

There may be misunderstandings about cord cutting, but no lies or falsehoods. First, successful cord cutting involves more than just streaming. The first place to start is connecting an antenna. The majority of Americans can receive 20-30 over-the-air (OTA) channels with a simple antenna. I can receive 35 channels (28 uniques, 7 duplicates) in a market barely in the top 50. There is not one bit streaming over the internet for the shows we watch OTA (which includes 96 of the top 100 shows currently on TV and a lot of sports).

Second, in many places one can upgrade his internet service if the speeds are not good enough. In fact, when I did this, I actually saved $5/month on internet in addition to what I saved by ditching the DirecTV bill.

Yes, you do get different options with paid TV, but it costs ~$1,000/year. That’s a lot to pay just because you want to watch a few shows and sporting events not otherwise available. In the end, it’s just TV. It’s not food, clothing, or a nice vacation, something an extra $1,000 will go a long ways toward paying for.

I happen to be an upper-middle-class professional living in a very affluent area. Recently, several of our affluent neighbors have asked us about our set up, saying that they too are beginning to consider cutting the cord. The boob-tube just isn’t worth $1,000/year even to many people with high-six-figure and low-seven-figure incomes. We can afford it; it just isn’t a good use of our money.

So the old media can keep lying to itself all it wants to, cord cutting is real and there is going to be a lot more of it going on. I predict 2014-2015 will be the tipping point. When lawyers, doctors, and business owners are beginning to explore cord cutting, it is a very real phenomenon.

I don’t know what everyone was complaining about. I watched TRUE DETECTIVE on Monday morning via HBO Go and it worked like a charm! It’s funny how quickly we grow entitled to something, especially in terms of technology, that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior.